Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  “Do you know what I have been guilty of? I have thought! Terrible isn’t it? But worse still—I have thought of you! And worse and worse—I never had that familiar Grecian countenance framed in Scottish red in my mind’s eye without another face close to it—softer still, prettier still, and fully as intelligent and gentle. I have that strange face before me now.” Pulitzer vowed that in two weeks time he would come to Gloucester, and he closed the letter with “Yours forever.”

  Ten days later, Pulitzer received a reply from Davidson. It was less than he hoped. “Tom!!!” Pulitzer wrote back. “The battles of Salamis, Sadaina or Ledars were nothing compared with the struggle that just closed in my breast.” Pulitzer was looking for a signal to join Davidson in the East. There was none. Instead he chose to take a business trip to Denver. Had Davidson been more forthcoming, Pulitzer said, his decision might have been different. “Well, there is hope yet. I’ll be back in less than fourteen days and, if upon my return, I find a less mysterious and more detailed epistle I’ll go right on to Boston.”

  In the end, however, Davidson remained in the East and Pulitzer in St. Louis. The philosopher had abandoned Pulitzer, as he had abandoned other young men everywhere he went. But in this case, Davidson left behind a pupil whose unschooled intelligence had been polished into a studied intellect. It had been an emotionally wrenching passage for Pulitzer. Except for the letters he would write to women he later courted, there is no other existing Pulitzer correspondence so wrought with feelings. His friendship with Davidson was the deepest that he would have with anyone else except his wife. For unlike Davidson, Pulitzer would marry and father children.

  Chapter Four

  POLITICS AND JOURNALISM

  Politics and journalism were two sides of the same coin when Pulitzer joined the staff of the Westliche Post. Out-of-work politicians became newspaper editors, and successful editors became elected politicians. Most newspapers remained financially tied to political patrons, and often their political origins were reflected in their names, such as the Missouri Republican and Missouri Democrat.* Even the few new independent newspapers made it an all-consuming task to cover politics. Politics was the lifeblood of journalism. “Every newspaper man, if not a politician, took an interest therein,” said Pulitzer’s friend Charles Johnson. By coming to work for the city’s most widely circulated German newspaper, Pulitzer stepped into the world of Republican politics.

  Germans in St. Louis were ardent Republicans, a loyalty that grew from their devotion to abolition. Radical Republicans—those members of the party who favored more punitive Reconstruction measures, the destruction of Confederate sympathies, and protection of freed slaves—were in control of Missouri. They conducted politics as they had the war, with a kind of scorched earth approach. Opposing Radical rule was futile.

  The keystone of Republican dominance of Missouri was a punitive constitution adopted at the end of the war. During the early years of Reconstruction, Missouri Radicals went farther than those in any other state in creating a system of registration, tests, and oaths to keep former rebels and their sympathizers from the ballot box and civic life. Missourians could not vote, become teachers, lawyers, or even ministers without stating in writing that they had never favored or supported the Confederacy. Thousands were disenfranchised on the basis of a definition of disloyalty so vague as to include men whose distant cousins might have fought on the wrong side of the war.

  Republicans feared that they would lose their grip on power without the constitution’s loyalty provisions. But though these provisions squelched Democratic opposition, a threat was growing from within the party. The more moderate members wanted to restore suffrage to all white voters and feared that the long-run interest of the party was in danger if the restrictions weren’t lifted. Among the Germans, this wing was led by Preetorius and Schurz, who was settling in as copublisher of the paper. In the English-speaking community the movement was led by politicians such as Pulitzer’s friend Johnson.

  Pulitzer fell in line like a foot soldier. Taking orders from Schurz provided him with an apprenticeship in American immigrant politics. In the three years he had been in St. Louis, Pulitzer had worked hard to develop friendships with men whom he perceived to be on a path to power or success. Now he was with one who had both. Remarkably, Schurz was also among the very first American political figures Pulitzer had learned about when he arrived in the United States. It was Schurz, after all, who had created the First Lincoln Cavalry, in which Pulitzer served.

  Schurz placed the Westliche Post and himself in the service of the 1868 Republican presidential campaign, using the newspaper to persuade Germans in St. Louis that General Ulysses Grant was their man—and using his oratorical skills to persuade Germans in other states. For Schurz, journalism was one weapon on the political battlefield. His speeches were another. None of this was lost on Pulitzer, who had now spent two years working at the paper. “He was my chief,” said Pulitzer. “We often traveled together, yet in all that time I never saw him pass an idle moment, either in the office or on the road, or anywhere else.”

  Pulitzer not only assumed the Republican faith of his boss but followed Schurz’s model. “Pulitzer,” said Johnson, “as soon as he was fairly in harness as a reporter, became active in politics.” He joined his neighborhood’s Republican organization; and by August 1868 he was rewarded for his efforts by being selected as the secretary of the Radical club of the Fifth Ward. Pulitzer’s ambition did not go unnoticed. “There never seemed to be any doubt in his mind,” said Preetorius, “that he would succeed in something.”

  In November, with the election won, Missouri Republicans turned their attention to selecting their next U.S. senator. Even though Schurz had barely arrived in the state, he set his sights on winning the seat. Republicans in St. Louis, heavily German, were intent on regaining control of the party from Senator Charles Drake, whom they despised.

  The contest gave Pulitzer a front-row seat at a battle of Reconstruction politics. One of his friends, William M. Grosvenor, editor of the Missouri Democrat, was among a group of three leaders backing Schurz who also included Gratz Brown (a former U.S. senator) and Preetorius. They considered Schurz an ideal candidate for the Senate. He had no political battle scars from Missouri, and thus few enemies; he was a Republican whose support of the party went back to Lincoln’s first presidential campaign; and he had the support of the considerable German population.

  A New Englander of uncommon talent, Grosvenor was a big, fleshy man with olive skin and a mane of hair, a bushy beard, and heavy eyebrows that gave him the fierce look of a lion. Although one worked for a German paper and the other for an English paper, Pulitzer and Grosvenor found they shared a reformist agenda. They both wanted to restore the vote to disenfranchised Democrats and compete openly in elections. They thought it was their job as journalists to bring this about.

  In early January 1869, Pulitzer accompanied Preetorius and Schurz to Jefferson City, the state capital, as the legislature met and prepared to select Missouri’s next senator. Schurz told the Republican caucus what it wanted to hear, that he supported President Grant and the Fifteenth Amendment, giving black citizens the right to vote. But he added that the time had also come to lift voting restrictions on disenfranchised white citizens. The appeal triggered an attack from Drake, the architect of the plan to keep Democrats from the voting booth. Drake could hardly contain his temper, and he became especially provoked when Schurz continually interrupted his speech to take issue with his various accusations. Then Drake made a fatal mistake. He broadened his assault on Schurz to include all German immigrants and questioned their loyalty.

  His maneuver gave Schurz the opportunity he sought. He was merciless in his rebuttal. Declaring his pride in being German-born, he reminded the audience that he and other Germans had fought to save the Union and damned Drake for having wavered on the issue of slavery. It worked. The caucus voted for Schurz. “I had one of the greatest triumphs of my life last night,” he told Pr
eetorius. “Drake was completely crushed.”

  Preetorius and Pulitzer rushed their own accounts of the triumph into print. Preetorius’s was in the refined classical German most commonly found in the paper. Pulitzer’s was sprinkled with rollicking humor, biting sarcasm, and double entendres, including one that alluded to menstruation with regard to Schurz’s opponent. He invoked his favorite theme as a reporter: the press illuminates the dark recesses of government to which politicians retreat at decision-making time. “A great step forward was taken with yesterday’s open caucus in the Hall of Representatives,” Pulitzer wrote. “The battle for the Senate has been lifted from the basement of secret intrigues to the public forum. Initially revealed to the people by the press, now it will be sorted out verbally in front of everyone in the halls of the Capitol.” It was sorted out. A few days later the legislature followed the caucus’s lead and gave Schurz the job.

  Schurz’s election altered life at the Westliche Post. Soon he had gone to Washington and was overwhelmed with political work. “I have hardly time to read the newspaper, let alone to write for it,” Schurz wrote back from the capital. Normally Preetorius would have picked up more of the editorial responsibilities, but he was ill. So the management of the paper fell on the shoulders of its ill-equipped city editor, Louis Willich, a twenty-seven-year-old who had been in St. Louis for less time than Pulitzer and was hardly an expert on the city or its political topology.

  The vacuum at the top of the staff became an opportunity at the bottom for Pulitzer. His work soon became the mainstay of the paper. He wandered around St. Louis at all hours, visiting schools and public institutions, attending public meetings and ward meetings, knocking on doors of lawyers and politicians, and opening those doors that didn’t yield to a knock. “His thirst for news was unquenchable,” recalled a stenographer at the St. Louis Police Commission. The commissioners often met behind closed doors. “Not infrequently on those occasions the door would softly open, and a pale, spectacled face would intrude itself on the privacy of the session, with the inquiry ‘any news?’ followed by the roughest but good natured cry ‘Get out of here!’ and a hearty laugh at the persistency of the inquisitor.”

  Pulitzer even took his door-opening to the state capital. One night a group of Democratic legislators were caucusing, and only reporters from Democratic newspapers had been permitted in the room. Suddenly the doors were thrown open, recalled another reporter, and “through the open casement calmly walked the correspondent of the Westliche Post. He stepped to the reporters’ table without a word, placed a pad of paper before him, and took his seat without question or objection from the members.”

  It wasn’t long before just about every politician and reporter had caught a glimpse of this peripatetic member of the press. Pulitzer’s appearance alone was conversation-worthy and was a source of much merriment among reporters. He wore buff-colored pants too short for his long legs, a coarse hickory shirt without a tie, and a soiled jacket. To complete his singular apparel with the required head covering, he made do with a chip hat of plaited split palm leaves, probably bought for 15 cents and held together with an ordinary piece of grocer’s string.

  Reporters poked fun at him. “They laughed at his ungainly form, his primitive attire; they made sport of his nose, coupling it with his peculiar cognomen ‘pull-it-sir’ in a way that was calculated to drive a supersensitive person to distraction,” recalled the police stenographer. Some called him “Joey the Jew.” The more charitable ones gave him the moniker “Shakespeare” for his resemblance to the bard’s profile. But Pull-it-sir ignored the taunting. “He pursued his course heedless of the rebuffs and coarse witticisms and they soon began to recognize his worth,” recalled the stenographer. “It was then that he won their confidence and esteem.”

  For good reason. Although Pulitzer cut a strange figure among the reporters, there was nothing lacking in the stories he churned out for the Westliche Post. In addition to writing an endless stream of local news, the bread and butter of the business, Pulitzer wrote pithy, cogent stories on St. Louis politics in an inimitable style that stood out from the more classical, restrained German used by Preetorius and others. “We all soon learned to appreciate and make the most of his extraordinary capacity for news gathering,” admitted a reporter for the competing Republican. “He was an able reporter—trenchant with the pen,” Johnson said, “fearless in attacking wrong or corruption, and at times bitter and acrimonious in his assaults.”

  As Pulitzer mastered English, though he still spoke it with a heavy accent, he widened his social circle, and Johnson became one of his best friends outside the German community. The thirty-year-old Johnson, nine years Pulitzer’s senior, liked reporters, having worked in the printing trade and published a small newspaper as a teenager. After serving a term as city attorney, he had been appointed state attorney for St. Louis in 1866.

  Although Johnson admired his young friend’s aggressive reporting, others were less enthusiastic. It worried the city councilor Anthony Ittner, another man with whom Pulitzer made friends in the course of covering politics. Like Johnson, Ittner was about a decade older than Pulitzer. He had been in St. Louis since he was seven, had built up his bricklaying trade, and was now running his own brickyard. Ittner believed Pulitzer went too far in the tone of his articles and in his arguments with others, and that he was devoid of fear. “It was not an uncommon thing for him to use language in a heated controversy or dispute that went beyond the limit,” Ittner said. “In fact, I cautioned him that he must become more conservative and forbearing for fear that he might someday meet a person like himself and then there would be trouble.”

  In Pulitzer’s eyes, the villain of his new world was the notoriously corrupt county government. St. Louis County was probably no worse a den of political iniquity than most burgeoning urban areas in the years following the Civil War. Here, as in other cities, businessmen, party leaders, politicians, and, in many cases, newspaper publishers developed a web of financially beneficial relationships. Businessmen obtained lucrative contracts, party leaders gained favors for their troops of loyal followers, and politicians won elected office and enhanced their earnings. Newspapers weren’t exempt from wrongdoing, either. Publishers who favored those in power were awarded legal advertisements, printing contracts, and sometimes even cash payments.

  In the summer of 1869 the county government’s excesses were all too visible during the construction of a new insane asylum. It was an irresistible topic for Pulitzer’s caustic pen. Five stories tall, with a cupola, the asylum had been built at a cost of $700,000, nearly twice the original estimate. Everything about the project had the odor of corruption. For instance, when the construction firm that had been engaged to drill a well failed to strike water at a reasonable depth, it just continued merrily drilling down. The resulting hole, 3,850 feet deep, still without water, became the second-deepest shaft in the world and an object of local ridicule when Pulitzer dubbed it the “well of fools.”

  Pulitzer tenaciously reported on each step of the county’s handling of the project. One day he discovered that county politicians were going to erase a financial mistake made by some lawyers. During the construction of the asylum, these attorneys had acted as guarantors to a brick supplier. The supplier failed to deliver all the promised materials when he realized that he had bid too low for the job and would lose money. The lawyers, in their capacity as guarantors, were thus required to pay for the undelivered bricks. Pulitzer learned that the lawyers were seeking to have the county pay them for their loss. In a session where only four of the seven county judges were in attendance, the county court agreed.

  From the pages of the Westliche Post, Pulitzer lashed out at the judges. Using what had become one of his favorite reportorial techniques, he filled his copy with questions for his readers: “Do the citizens want to let this infamous County Court pull the wool over their eyes? Do they want to concede, with quiet acceptance of what transpired and indifferent behavior, that the County Court c
an do what it wants with public money? Has the Insane Asylum not cost them enough already?” Then Pulitzer changed from questioner to instructor. “We want the citizens to answer these questions for themselves, and we want those answers in the form of energetic action. It is high time that they make their position clear to the County Court and explain to them that they were not elected to squander communal money, still damp with the people’s sweat, but rather to guard this with utmost providence!”

  Under this withering attack, the full court voted to revoke the payment. It was a triumph for Pulitzer. He magnanimously shared the credit for the victory with Preetorius, Ittner, and several others who had promised to file suit to stop the payment if the court had not reversed itself. Pulitzer warned that the victory was limited to this one issue. There was more to be gained. “The eternal waffling on important issues, the revoltingly frivolous handling of public money, the revocation thereof only hours prior: All of this leads to only one conclusion, that the current county judges are either totally incapable of representing the interest of their constituents and the county, or that something is very rotten here.” Pulitzer demanded that the judges resign. It would be a miracle if this happened, he conceded. “How can the current situation best be changed? Hereupon we answer with the words that have appeared at the head of our local column numerous times in the past weeks: Down with the County Court!”

  In battling the county court, Pulitzer elevated his own reputation. Even though newspapers carried no bylines, most readers and politicians knew who was the author of the attacks. He had earlier earned the respect of his colleagues in the press for his persistence and perspicacity, and now he was being noticed by people outside the ranks of the fourth estate. “Pulitzer was fighting the most powerful and corrupt ring in St. Louis with money and patronage to back it,” the lime merchant Theodore Welge said, “and could have had any amount of money in the shape of gifts or otherwise. He was without funds except for the small salary he drew as a reporter for the Westliche Post.”